Oh, You Thought 1 GHZ, Dual-Core CPUs Were Fast? Meet Texas Instruments’ OMAP 5: 2 Ghz, Quad-Core

Whenever the Flux Capacitor is invented, this thing will probably power it

1 Ghz CPUs were all the rage in high-end smartphones throughout 2010 — and right now, the trend is to stick an extra core on that 1 Ghz CPU and call it a day. Nvidia bumped things up a big ol’ notch a few days ago when they unveiled the Tegra3, a 1.5 Ghz mobile processor with not one, not two, but four cores. This morning, Texas Instruments is taking things even further.

Following up on their OMAP3 (which powered the Droid Pro, Droid 2, Pre 2, and a bunch of other devices) and OMAP4 (which’ll power the BlackBerry Playbook when it starts shipping) chipsets, Texas Instruments has just pulled back the curtain on OMAP5.

OMAP5, In a nutshell:

Clock speeds up to 2Ghz

TI promises processing performance 3x that of OMAP4, all while improving average power consumption by 60%.

Quad-cores: 2 ARM Cortex-A15 cores capable of speeds up to 2 Ghz, and 2 Cortex-M4 cores

TI claims it can support 3 QSXGA displays running at the same time. QSXGA is a resolution of 2560×2048 — that’s way, way higher than what 90% of the monitors out there can display.

TI’s putting some stress on the fact that these things should be able to handle multiple cameras recording simultaneously with ease, which could very well mean 3D camera phones are about to become pretty common.

Samples will begin shipping to manufacturers in late 2011, with the first devices expected to hit the market around the mid-point of 2012.

[Via Phonescoop]